Change Everything Without Changing Anything

Each day you get up pit­ted against obsta­cles. Income, rela­tion­ships, health, cir­cum­stances, world pol­i­tics, shift­ing economies — it feels like you are caught in an avalanche. Things should be bet­ter, but they are not. The social/economic land­scape seems out of con­trol, lost, wan­der­ing around with unbe­liev­able amounts of money dis­ap­pear­ing into pol­icy and pro­gram bot­tom­less pits.

Spir­i­tu­al­ity works best in these sit­u­a­tions. Use your spir­i­tual tools. Fight­ing impos­si­ble odds will leave you burned out by mid-morning. When things are impos­si­ble, reach for the tool that solves it all. It has the abil­ity to change every­thing with­out chang­ing any­thing. It is called: Accep­tance. It is sit­ting right in the front of the spir­i­tual tool chest.

Accep­tance is not pas­sive. It reaches out and embraces the impos­si­ble to con­trol. It acknowl­edges the nature of chaos. Most of all, it has the patience to wait until chaos becomes cre­ation. No, we are not falling off the earth. Life con­tin­ues. We eat. We live. We laugh. The essence of life has lit­tle if any­thing to do with what you see on the news.

Get­ting to accep­tance is not always easy. To get there, we have to replace “should” with “is” and choose to be con­tent with the results. It is one of those “Thy will be done” dynam­ics. Deity is work­ing out the com­plex­i­ties of his­tory as a mir­ror to Divine Char­ac­ter. “Wait­ing upon the Lord” takes more than patience, it takes the faith that tem­po­rary scenes are not ulti­mate outcomes.

They have a say­ing in recov­ery groups: “Noth­ing changes until it becomes what it is.” In other words, what you reject keeps you stuck. Things are what they are. Begin there. Cel­e­brate changes when they come — even if they look more con­fus­ing than what you first per­ceived. Maybe the chaos is more inside of you than out­side of you. Things calm down when you calm down. In the end, accep­tance comes to you. You see the big­ger pic­ture and are no longer threat­ened. It all changed, and you did not even get up from your chair.